PAULETTE Hamilton, who was slammed this week over shocking comments made through social media, has won the by-election in Birmingham Erdington, and will now sit as a member of Parliament.
The by-election was called after the sudden death of the constituency’s MP Jack Dromey.
Yet Labour’s candidate of choice quickly came under fire over comments made in a public debate.
Ms Hamilton was speaking at an event titled “The Ballot or the Bullet – Does your vote count?” in 2015 about increasing ethnic minorities’ representation in politics.
GB News published footage of Ms Hamilton saying she believed in voting but was not sure “we will get what we really deserve in this country using the vote”.
She also said Muslim Labour MPs in the area were not looking after “the needs of the community”.
In a video published by GB News, Ms Hamilton says: “So you talk about the bullet or the vote – I’m not sure, although I believe in the vote and I believe in our right to use that vote, or destroy that vote, I’m not sure we will get what we really deserve in this country using the vote.
“But I don’t know if we are a strong enough group to get what we want to get if we have an uprising. I think we will be quashed in such a way we would lose a generation of our young people. So I am very torn.
“I went away and watched the Malcolm X film to make sure and listened to a lot of what he said to make sure I was ready.”
In the video she also referenced the so-called Trojan Horse affair from 2014, which saw several schools in Birmingham investigated amid claims that a group of conservative Muslims had plotted to take them over and install sympathetic school governors.
In 2017, the case against five senior teachers accused of professional misconduct was dropped after an independent panel found the integrity of the process had been “called into disrepute”.
In the video from 2015, Ms Hamilton says: “We have a Trojan horse in the council” and said “our Muslim brothers and sisters” had “made a plan” to “ensure that their teachings and what have you got into the system”.
She added: “What then happened was many of the schools, inner-city schools in Birmingham, the Muslim families they filled schools, they then made sure they took over the governorships, as they took over the governorships they made sure that the heads of those schools were people they wanted to represent their cause.
“What they then did with doing all of this was made sure that their religious views and their beliefs were taken through the education system, it was also then taken into politics.”
She added: “We have large numbers of Muslim councillors, we’ve got two MPs in this city, that look after the – well, they don’t – but they’re supposed to look after the needs of the community.
“What’s happened is they’ve got into positions of power, they’ve forgotten the reason they were put there in the first place. The problem with our community – is we’re not even on the map.”
Speaking about increasing black and minority ethnic representation in politics, she then added that postal votes were a way that ethnic minority communities could “lock it down” and increase their voting turnout as “in one household you can have eight votes and it’s locked down”.
Turnout was an expectedly low 27%, with a total of 17,016 ballots cast, fewer than the 17,720 votes Dromey alone received in 2019.
The final result:
Paulette Hamilton (Lab) 9,413 (55.51%)
Robert Alden (C) 6,147 (36.25%)
